I’m on my history bookshelf.
Next book on this shelf is called Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power
I’ve been a mild fan of Hanson for quite some time, and am excited he has his own site now, where all his articles are listed, because I won’t read his regular stuff on National Review. As long as NRO continues to publish the ravings of homophobic bigot John Derbyshire, they will never get my clicks. I can’t support an organization that gives Derbyshire a platform. We all have principles, lines in the sand, and I have mine. If we don’t act according to our principles then who are we? Hanson is a good writer, and a good thinker. He’s an incredibly boring public speaker. I saw him on Book Notes once and was nearly put into a catatonic state by the monotone of his voice.
If you like Victor Davis Hanson and if you like his columns – then I highly suggest you check out Carnage and Culture. The blurb on the back of the book says: “Looking beyond popular explanations such as geography or advanced technology, Hanson argues that it is in fact Western culture and values — the tradition of dissent, the importance placed on inventiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship — which have consistently produced superior arms and soldiers.” And by “superior”, Hanson means soldiers capable of the most “carnage”. Hanson feels ambivalently about this, as he expresses many times throughout the book – but I think he makes a very compelling case. His book was very controversial when it came out. He makes some very uncomfortable points – along the lines that Bernard Lewis does in his fantastic and important book What Went Wrong?. Actually – the word “uncomfortable” in that last sentence should probably be qualified. It doesn’t make ME uncomfortable. I’m just saying that it made SOME people uncomfortable, and there was a lot of weeping and wailing about it . It’s only “uncomfortable” if you are unwilling to examine certain historical facts, if you think that politically correct attitudes should not only dominate the present, but also dominate the past, if the whole concept of “victory” makes you feel a little bit ikky and ambivalent … then this book will make you very uncomfortable. This book also has a bit in common with the massively successful Guns, Germs, and Steel and it makes people “uncomfortable” in the same ways. Different cultures in different regions develop in different ways. DUH. Because of these differences – some cultures have been far more dominant in battle than others. DUH. Hanson theorizes that the West’s dominance is not just about superior technology, and geography – but about the actual culture itself. This makes a lot of people nervous – they don’t know what he’s reeeaaaallly trying to say. Is he trying to say that we shouldn’t respect other cultures?? Is he trying to say that it’s ALL RIGHT that we massacred such and such and so and so? I don’t hear him say ANY of that. But these folks are suspicious of his motives. I see it in a much simpler way. He’s a classical historian, and a military historian – not to mention a farmer in California. He looks at 9 battles throughout human history (Salamis, Gaugamela, Cannae, Poitiers, Tenochtitlan, Lepanto, Rorke’s Drift, Midway, Tet) and analyzes them. He has come to the conclusion that many Western traditions (like the ones listed above – ones that were not present in, say, ancient Persia) has helped Western armies to be the effective war machines they are today (and always have been). That’s it.
I’m going to excerpt a bit from the first chapter where he breaks down the battle at Salamis, – September 28, 480 BC – Greeks against the Persians. 40,000 men drowned that day. It’s really hard to contemplate that.
From Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power
The Persian Empire at the time of the battle of Salamis was huge — 1 million square miles of territory, with nearly 70 million inhabitants — at that point the largest single hegemony in the history of the civilized world. In contrast, Greek-speakers on the mainland numbered less than 2 million and occupied about 50,000 square miles. Persia was also a relatively young sovereignty, less than a hundred years old, robust in its period of greatest power — and largely the product of the genius of its legendary king Cyrus the Great. In a period of not more than thirty years (cs. 560-530 BC), Cyrus had transformed the rather small and isolated Persian monarchy (Parsua in what is now Iran and Kurdistan) into a world government. He finally presided over the conquered peoples of most Asia — ranging from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River, and covering most of the territory between the Persian Gulf and Red Sea in the south and the Caspian and Aral Seas to the north.
After the subsequent loss of the Ionian Greek states on the shores of the Aegean, the mainland Greeks grew familiar with this huge and sophisticated new empire now expanding near its eastern borders. What the Greeks learned of Persia — as would be the later European experience with the Ottomans — both fascinated and frightened them. Later an entire series of gifted politicians and renegade intriguers such as Demaratus, Themistocles, and Alcibiades would aid the Persians against their own Greek kin, and yet at the same time loathe their hosts for appealing nakedly to their personal greed. In a similar manner Italian admirals, ship designers, and tacticians would later seek lucrative employment with the Ottomans. Greek moralists, in relating culture and ethics, had long equated Hellenic poverty with liberty and excellence, Eastern alliance with slavery and decadence. So the poet Phocylides wrote, “The law-biding polis, though small and set on a high rock, outranks senseless Nineveh.”
By the time of the reign of Darius I (521 – 486 BC) Persia was a relatively stable empire, governed by the so-called Achaemenid monarchy that oversaw a sophisticated provincial administration of some twenty satrapies. Persian governors collected taxes, provided musters for national campaigns, built and maintained national roads and an efficient royal postal service, and in general left local conquered peoples the freedom to worship their own gods and devise their own means for meeting targeted levels of imperial taxation. To the Greeks, who could never unify properly their own vastly smaller mainland, the Achaemenids’ confederation of an entire continent raised the specter of a force of men and resources beyond their comprehension.
What mystified Westerners most — we can pass over their prejudicial view of Easterners as soft, weak, and effeminate — was the Persian Empire’s almost total cultural antithesis to everything Hellenic, from politics and military practice to economic and social life. Only a few miles of sea separated Asia Minor from the Grreek islands in the Aegean, but despite a similar climate and centuries of interaction, the two cultures were a world apart. This foreign system had resulted not in weakness and decadence, as the Greeks sometimes proclaimed, but ostensibly in relatively efficient imperial administration and vast wealth: Xerxes was on the Athenian acropolis, the Greeks (not yet) in Persepolis. An awe-inspiring impression of Persian power was what Greeks gleaned from itinerant traders, their own imported Eastern chattel slaves, communication from their Ionian brethren, the thousands of Greek-speakers who found employment in the Persian bureaucracy, and random tales from returning mercenaries. The success of the Achaemenid dynasty suggested that there were peoples in the world — and in increasing proximity to Greece — who did things far differently, and in the process became far more wealthy and prosperous than the Greeks.
The absolute rule of millions was in the hands of a very few. The king and his small court of relatives and advisers (their Persian titles variously translate as “bow carrier,” “spear bearer,” “king’s friends,” “the king’s benefactor”, “the eyes and ears of the king,” etc.) oversaw the bureaucracy and priesthood, which thrived from the collection of provincial taxes and ownership of vast estates, while a cadre of Persian elites and Achaemenid kin ran the huge multicultural army. There was apparently no abstract or legal concept of freedom in Achaemenid Persia. Even satraps were referred to as slaves in imperial correspondence: “The King of Kings, Darius son of Hystapes, says these things to his slave Gadatas: ‘I learn that you are not obeying my commands in all respects …'” (R. Meiggs and D. Lewis, eds., Greek Historical Inscriptions, #12, 1-5). The Achaemenid monarch was absolute and, though not divine himself, the regent of the god Ahura Mazda on earth. The practice of proskynesis — kneeling before the Great King — was required of all subjects and foreigners. Aristotle later saw this custom of worshiping men as gods as proof of the wide difference between Eastern and Hellenic notions of individualism, politics, and religion. Whereas the victorious Greek generals of the Persian Wars — the regent Pausanias in Sparta, Miltiades and Themistocles at Athens — were severely criticized for identifying their persons with the Greek triumph, Xerxes, when attempting to cross a choppy Hellespont, had the sea “whipped and branded” for “disobeying” his orders.
Legal codes exist in every civilization. Under the Persians, local judiciaries were left in place at Lydia, Egypt, Babylonia, and Ionia — with the proviso that Achaemenid law superseded all statues, and was established and amended as the Great King himself saw fit. Every man bobbing in the water on September 28 had no legal entity other than as a bandaka, or “slave” of Xerxes — a concept taken from the earlier Babylonian idea that the individual was an ardu, a “chattel” of the monarch.
Contrarily, in Greece by the fifth century almost all political leaders in the city-states were selected by lot, elected, or subject to annual review by an elected council. No archon claimed divine status; execution by fiat was tantamount to murder; and the greatest vigilance was devoted to preventing the resurgence of tyrants, who had plagued a number of the most prosperous and commercial Greek states in the immediate past. Even personal slaves and servants in Greek city-states were often protected from arbitrary torture and murder. These were not alternative approaches to state rule, but fundamental differences in the idea of personal freedom that would help determine who lived and died at Salamis.
The Persian imperial army was huge and commanded at the top by relatives and elites under oath to the king. At its core were professional Persian infantrymen — the so-called Immortals were the most famous — and various contingents of subsidiary heavy and light infantry, supported by vast forces of cavalry, charioteers, and missile troops. In battle the army depended on its speed and numbers. In place of a heavily armed shock force of pikemen that could shatter horsemen and ground troops, Persian infantrymen were often conscripted from hundreds of different regions, spoke dozens of languages, and were armed with swords, daggers, short spears, picks, war axes, and javelins, and protected by wicker shields, leather jerkins, and occasionally chain-mail shirts. Drill, strict adherence to rank and file, and coordinated group advance and retreat were largely unknown. The Greeks’ dismissive view about the quality of Persian heavy infantry was largely accurate. Some years later, in the early fourth century, Antiochos, a Greek ambassador from Arcadia, said there was not a man fit in Persia for battle against Greeks. There was no need during the creation of the Persian Empire on the steppes of Asia to field phalanxes of citizen hoplites outfitted in seventy-pound panoplies.
The Achaemenid king was not always perched on a throne overlooking the killing ground — like Xerxes at Thermopylae and Salamis — but more regularly fought in a great chariot, surrounded by bodyguards, in the middle of the Persian battle line: both the safest and most logical position whence to issue orders. Greek historians made much of the obvious dissimilarity: Persian monarchs fled ahead of their armies in defeat, while there is not a single major Greek battle — Thermopylae , Delium, Mantinea, Leuctra — in which Hellenic generals survived the rout of their troops. Military catastrophe brought no reproach upon the Achaemenid king himself; subordinates like the Phoenicians at Salamis were scapegoated and executed. In contrast, there was also not one great Greek general in the entire history of the city-state — Themistocles, Militiades, Pericles, Alcibiades, Vrasidas, Lysander, Pelopidas, Epaminondas — who was not at some time either fined, exiled, or demoted, or killed alongside his troops. Some of the most successful and gifted commanders after their greatest victories — the Athenian admirals who won at Arginusae (406 BC) or Epaminondas on his return from liberating the Messenian helots (369 BC) — stood trial for their lives, not so much on charges of cowardice or incompetence as for inattention to the welfare of their men or the lack of communication with their civilian overseers.
In such a vast domain as Persia, there were in theory thousands of individual landholders and private businessmen, but the economic and cultural contrast with fifth-century Greece was again telling. In classical Athens we do not know of a single farm larger than one hundred acres, whereas in Asia — both under the Achaemenids and later during the Hellenistic dynasties — estates exceeded thousands of acres in size. One of Xerxes’ relatives might own more property than every rower in the Persian fleet combined. Most of the best land in the empire was under direct control of priests, who sharecropped their domains to serfs, and absentee Persian lords, who often owned entire villages. The Persian king himself, in theory, had title to all the land in the empire and could either exercise rights of confiscation of any estate he wished or execute its owner by fiat.
Greece itself had plenty of its own hierarchies concerning property owning, but the difference lay in the posture of a consensual government toward the entire question of land tenure. Public or religiously held estates were of limited size and relatively rare — comprising not more than 5 percent of the aggregate land surrounding a polis. Property was rather equitably held. Public auctions of repossessed farmland were standard, and prices at public sales low and uniform. Lands in new colonies were surveyed and distributed by lot or public sale, never handed over to a few elites. The so-called hoplite infantry class typically owned farms of about ten acres. In most city-states they made up about a third to half of the citizen population and controlled about two-thirds of all the existing arable land — a pattern of landholding far more egalitarian than, say, in present-day California, where 5 percent of the landowners own 95 percent of all agricultural property.
No Greek citizen could be arbitrarily executed without a trial. His property was not liable to confiscation except by vote of a council, whether that be a landed boule in broadly based oligarchies or a popular ekklesia under democracy. In the Greek mind the ability to hold property freely — have legal title to it, improve it, and pass it on — was the foundation of freedom. While such classical agrarian traditions would erode during the later Roman Empire and the early Dark Ages, with the creation of vast absentee estates and ecclesiastical fiefdoms, the ideal would not be abandoned, but rather still provided the basis for revolution and rural reform in the West from the Renaissance to the present day.
While there were vast state mints in Persia, our sources for Achaemenid imperial administration — borne out by the later arrival of the looters and plunderers in Alexander the Great’s army — suggest that tons of stored bullion remained uncoined and that there was a chronic stagnation in the Persian economy. With metals on deposit in imperial treasuries, provincial taxes were more often paid in kind as “gifts” — food, livestock, metals, slaves, property — rather than in specie, illustrative of high taxes and an undeveloped moneyed economy. One of the reasons for the initial rampant expansion and inflation of the later Hellenistic world (323-31 BC) was the sudden conversion of precious metals stored in the Achaemenid vaults into readily coined money by the Macedonian Successor kings, who, in transforming a command economy to a more capitalist one, hired out thousands of builders, shippers, and mercenaries.
Persian literature — a corpus of drama, philosophy, or poetry apart from religious or political structure — did not exist. True, Zoroastrianism was a fascinating metaphysical inquiry, but its reason to be was religious, and thus the parameters of its thought were one with all holy treatises, embedded as it was with a zeal that precluded unlimited speculation and true free expression. History — the Greeks’ idea of free inquiry, in which the records and sources of the past are continually subject to questioning and evaluation as part of an effort to provide a timeless narrative of explication — was also unknown among the Persians, at least in any widely disseminated form. The nearest approximation was the public inscriptions of the Achaemenids themselves, in which a Darius I or Xerxes published his own res gestae:
The emperor Augustus issued similar proclamations in imperial Rome, but there were still a Suetonius, Plutarch and Tacitus eventually to set the record straight. Just as the Ottomans would later bar printing presses throughout their empire in fear of free expression, the idea of public criticism of the Achaemenids through written documents was literally unknown.
All Persian texts — whether public inscriptions, palace inventories, or sacred tracts — concern the king, his priests, and bureaucrats at large, and confine themselves to government and religion. Even if other avenues of public expression had existed, the Persian victory at Thermopylae could not have been portrayed onstage or remembered in poetry without the approval of Xerxes — and not without Xerxes as chief protagonist in the triumph. The commemoration of the Persian victory in Bactria proves that well enough: “Says Xerxes the king: When I became king, there was within these lands which are written above one which was restless. Afterward Ahura Mazda brought me help. By the favor of Ahura Mazda I smote that land and put it in its place.” (A. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire, 231)
Persian religion was not as absolutist as that in Egypt, inasmuch as the Achaemenids were agents of Ahura Mazda, not divinities per se. Nevertheless, royal power was predicated on divine right, imperial edict was considered a holy act. So the constant refrain of all the Achaemenid kings: “Of me is Ahura Mazda, of Ahura Mazda am I.” When Alexander the Great learned to say the same thing, even his most loyal Macedonian lords began to plot either an assassination, a coup, or a return to Greece. Conquered peoples of the Persian Empire like the Babylonians and Jews, however, at the local level were left to worship their own gods. Because no culture in the conquered East had any tradition of religion apart from politics, or even embraced the ideal of religious divinity, most Persian subjects considered the Achaemenid religious-political relationship not any different from their own — and if anything more tolerant.
That being said, there were numerous castes of holy men who not only enjoyed political power as agents of the king but also sought vast acreages to support their work. The official white-robed magi were employed by the monarchy as religious auditors in public ceremony and to ensure the piety of the imperial subjects. Mathematics and astronomy were advanced, but ultimately they were subject to religious scrutiny and used to promote in a religious context the arts of divination and prophesy. A humanist such as Protagoras (“Man is the measure of all things”) or an atheist rationalist like Anaxagoras (“Whatever has life, both the greater and smaller, Mind [nous] controls them all … whatsoever things are now and will be, Mind arranged them all”) could not have prospered under the Achaemenids. Such freethinking in Persia might arise only through imperial laxity; and if discovered, was subject to immediate imperial censure. The classical Greeks were as pious as the Persians, but when conservative citizens rallied to rid their cities of atheistic provocateurs, they first sought a majority decree of the people or at least the semblance of an open jury trial.
If in the past Western historians have relied on Greek authors such as Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Euripides, Isocrates, and Plato to form stereotypes of the Persians as decadent, effete, corrupt, and under the spell of eunuchs and harems, the careful examination of imperial archives and inscriptions of the Achaemenids should warn us of going too far in the other direction. The Persian army at Salamis was not decadent or effeminate, but it did constitute a complete alternate universe to almost everything Greek. All things considered, there was no polis to the East. Achaemenid Persia — like Ottoman Turkey or Montezuma’s Aztecs — was a vast two-tiered society in which millions were ruled by autocrats, audited by theocrats, and coerced by generals.
This is extremely interesting, although I am no expert in military matters, either. I am really curious as to Hanson’s take on Cannae, of course! :)
Ceci – of course! He really goes into great detail about each battle – I highly recommend the book!
About the Persians: “Drill, strict adherence to rank and file, and coordinated group advance and retreat were largely unknown”…isn’t that interesting? Although Persian culture was far more *autocratic* than Greek, at the sharp end where it counted, it was less *organized*.
David – hmmm, I did not notice that dichotomy. Very intersting, indeed. Another one of his points he makes over and over and over again – is that if the army has a sense that they are fighting for an actual HOMEland – which can only happen if there is a concept of “citizenship” – then they will fight much harder and be much more effective. Perisans used slaves and mercenaries who basically were either terrified or they didn’t give a crap and just wanted to get paid.
But your point about the whole organizational factor is VERY intersting, I think.
It sort of fits with something I read elsewhere: “The First and the Last,” by Luftwaffe General Adolph Galland (an incredibly good writer, BTW). He describes considerable chaos in German fighter and air-defense activities: for example, local leaders in Germany were often able to pull strings to get permanent fighter patrols assigned to their areas, even though this was not an effective way of managing the resource.
It may be that dictatorships are not really even good at making the trains run on time…